A virtual community is a social network of online users, with a common interest, idea, task or goal, that interact in a computer generated virtual society across time, geographical and organizational boundaries. Different virtual communities have different levels of interaction and participation among their users. The different levels of interaction and participation among users range from, for example, adding comments to a community message board, or multiple users simultaneously competing against each other in an online video game.
An early example of a virtual community is an online chat room. An online chat room allows multiple users to communicate by sending text messages to users logged in to the same chat-room in real-time. Some chat rooms use both text and voice simultaneously. There are also graphical user interface (GUI) text-based chat rooms which allow users to select an identifying icon and modify the look of their chat Environment.
As the notion of a virtual community has advanced along with technological capability, virtual worlds have been created. A virtual world is a computer-based simulated Environment intended for multiple users to inhabit and interact via avatars. These avatars are usually depicted as textual, two-dimensional, or three-dimensional graphical representations of the users themselves, although other forms are possible (auditory and touch sensations for example). When a user logs onto a virtual world, the user's client computer accesses the computer-simulated world and presents perceptual stimuli to the user, who in turn can manipulate elements of the modeled world and thus experiences telepresence to a certain degree. Such modeled worlds may appear similar to the real world or instead depict fantasy worlds. Communication between users has ranged from text, graphical icons, visual gesture, sound, and rarely, forms using touch and balance senses. Massive multiplayer online games commonly depict a world similar to the real world, with real world rules and real-time actions, and communication. Communication is usually textual, with real-time voice communication using VOIP also possible.
Examples of conventional systems can be found at www.graffitiwall.com, U.S. Pat. No. 6,691,155, http://www.drawball.com/, and virtual worlds (e.g. second life) and massively multiplayer online games (e.g. World of Warcraft).